Opticraft Community

Please include all and only discussion about the recent changes in this thread so the general discussion board doesn't get blown up with the same topics.
https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/
Now we've probably all heard of it at this point (at least anyone who ever browses mojang's home page or /r/minecraft)
Now basically nothing in that topic affects us but one point:

QuoteYou cannot charge real-world cash for in-game currency

I'm not sure what we're going to do with that donation perk.. But yeah. Leave your comments and questions in the replies only please.
Thanks, liek

Edit: here's a TL;DR politely given by Dinnerbone:

Quote@Dinnerbone:
2014-06-12 18:04:57 UTC
Ingame currency to unlock gameplay stuff is fine. Real money to unlock gameplay stuff is not fine, nor money to buy the ingame currency.

Who donates for money these days anyways? I think we could use a donation perk, and hell, maybe it can just replace money. How about we bring the creative discussion and have a donation perk in order to get to the creative world, idk. It would fit within their rules as well. Plug in the words Creative Server into the quote.

Ingame currency to Unlock Creative World is fine. Real money to unlock Creative World is not fine, nor money to buy the ingame currency.

Now however, since it doesn't fit that well, you know how the first rule: You are allowed to charge players to access your server. Huhhh, Creative Server different thing than smp.opticraft.net kinda like classic? There you go, it would be okay and under the rules.

[spoiler]500th post [/spoiler]

Quote from: LIEKABOWSE on June 12, 2014, 11:51:33 PM

Quote
Edit: here's a TL;DR politely given by Dinnerbone:

Quote@Dinnerbone:
2014-06-12 18:04:57 UTC
Ingame currency to unlock gameplay stuff is fine. Real money to unlock gameplay stuff is not fine, nor money to buy the ingame currency.

so haven't read the new eula or anything but it seems from this that the concern is more so they don't want people going "you need to spend $5 to unlock dirt" where as with us anyone can use dirt (or any other example block) but if you spend money you can get large quantities of it without effort. we don't exactly restrict access to certain blocks unless you pay, which is what it seems like they wanna prevent.

Also and probably the more prevalent point is that we don't actually charge you for anything. It's a donation, not a price tag. you can get in-game currency right now for free and use it to acquire any block you please and the in-game currency isn't actually required in any way to play on the server. however should you choose to donate to the server (not required) you can choose to receive a "thank you reward" of in-game cash or various other options.

donate or not the server offers the same vanilla minecraft experience to anyone who chooses to play on it, all donating does is speed up the grind

You aren't paying for money on opticraft. You are making a charitable donation and also getting some in game currency, its a loophole. World of Warcraft private servers and other games use this same loophole to avoid being shut down. This doesn't effect us at all.

Quote from: Nothing_________ on June 13, 2014, 01:36:53 AM
You aren't paying for money on opticraft. You are making a charitable donation and also getting some in game currency, its a loophole. World of Warcraft private servers and other games use this same loophole to avoid being shut down. This doesn't effect us at all.

"You are allowed to accept donations
You are allowed to accept donations from players. You can thank them publicly or in-game, but can't give preferential treatment for donating. You are not allowed to restrict gameplay features in an attempt to make money." Thats from the post that was linked.

"Donations can only be received without giving anything in the game, everything else is a purchase. Using the correct term is important." From SeargeDP, a dev at Mojang.

This definitely affects us.

Hmm, are they trying to squeeze out private servers to funnel more people into their own servers?

Nothing is being restricted though, you can still play the whole game without donating. Sure you cant have mob disguises and such but as far as I know mojang doesn't have any control over the plug-ins. If you had to donate for permissions to break blocks or something of that source. I could be wrong but I still seriously doubt this will have anything impact on us.

Quote from: OzzyKP on June 13, 2014, 02:30:26 AM
Hmm, are they trying to squeeze out private servers to funnel more people into their own servers?

It definitely seems that way, but blizzard tried the same thing with private WoW servers and those are still going strong as ever.

Quote from: Nothing_________ on June 13, 2014, 01:36:53 AM
You aren't paying for money on opticraft. You are making a charitable donation and also getting some in game currency, its a loophole. World of Warcraft private servers and other games use this same loophole to avoid being shut down. This doesn't effect us at all.

But that's the loophole they are trying to shut down...

QuoteYou cannot charge real-world cash for in-game currency
We don't mind in-game currencies which are earned through playing, but you are not allowed to sell them for real-world cash. Remember – if the stuff you sell affects gameplay, we're not cool with it.

Also I agree they are trying to funnel into their own server system... with the new realms changes and additions it looks like mojang wants to start selling servers.  I believe realms cost 13$ a month.  You don't get access to server files though.

Also I like how prissy notch is being on twitter concering a game he ditched years ago, lol.
https://twitter.com/notch/status/476474677851062272
Mojang is messing with a system that shouldnt concern them.

QuoteYou are allowed to charge players to access your server
So long as the fee is the same for all players, you are allowed to charge for access to your server. You are not allowed to split your playerbase into paying, and non-paying users, nor can you restrict gameplay elements to different tiers of player.

Basically, if you're charging for access to your server, you are selling a "ticket" and there can only be one type of ticket, regardless of how much people are willing to spend.

So what if they start saying you can't restrict access at all, no whitelists, and no banning. "We decide who to ban"

Quote from: Nothing_________ on June 13, 2014, 03:31:59 AM
Nothing is being restricted though, you can still play the whole game without donating. Sure you cant have mob disguises and such but as far as I know mojang doesn't have any control over the plug-ins. If you had to donate for permissions to break blocks or something of that source. I could be wrong but I still seriously doubt this will have anything impact on us.

Quote from: OzzyKP on June 13, 2014, 02:30:26 AM
Hmm, are they trying to squeeze out private servers to funnel more people into their own servers?

It definitely seems that way, but blizzard tried the same thing with private WoW servers and those are still going strong as ever.

That's the thing, they do have control over it all. Purely aesthetic things like our hat command or mob disguises are fine in their eyes, but things like paying for in game money they dont like at all. The whole point is they dont want people making money off of their game, and it makes sense in a way. The problem is that most servers use that money to pay huge server costs which is partly due to how horribly optimized minecraft actually is. It requires much more power to run server wise than it really should. If mojang goes through and actually starts enforcing this they will easily lose at least 50% of their private servers due to them not having enough money to support themselves. All in all, its a great way to kill their own game.

I doubt they'll be able to police this change. They might shut down the first few servers, but at the end of the day, Mojang is a small indie dev, and their staff have better things to do.

I don't see a reason to change. If they decide to shut down every single account associated with a server that has donations, they might as well have killed Minecraft anyway, as far as I'm concerned.

I love this part..

"You are not allowed to restrict gameplay features in an attempt to make money."

"You are allowed to charge players to access your server"

Umm.. ok Mojang, pretty sure not being able to join a server is the biggest restriction you can make.

Quote from: xDeeKay on June 13, 2014, 02:19:36 PM
I love this part..

"You are not allowed to restrict gameplay features in an attempt to make money."

"You are allowed to charge players to access your server"

Umm.. ok Mojang, pretty sure not being able to join a server is the biggest restriction you can make.

That's a good way to drain the lake and show the fish their amazing ocean.

The problem here is that Mojang doesn't understand the difference between normal servers and pay-to-win servers.
Mojang has a huge negative opinion on servers that has a pay-to-win mentality, and in a way I agree with it, but it doesn't understand that normal servers and small servers don't enforce a pay-to-win mentality, but rather just add an option so that they can hold their server up. None of these servers ever restrict a player to bare-bone items.

Quote from: raul7legend on June 14, 2014, 10:15:53 AM
The problem here is that Mojang doesn't understand the difference between normal servers and pay-to-win servers.
Mojang has a huge negative opinion on servers that has a pay-to-win mentality, and in a way I agree with it, but it doesn't understand that normal servers and small servers don't enforce a pay-to-win mentality, but rather just add an option so that they can hold their server up. None of these servers ever restrict a player to bare-bone items.

We its extremely unlikely that they would ever go after small servers like us. They are interested in the huge servers that could potentially make thousands of dollars on top of paying for their server.

Come on...they killed classic and are now making their first step to killing multiplayer.

Anyways, what are we going to do about it? I see there are three broad/general actions:

1. Remain unchanged, hopefully Mojang doesn't screw us up. Pretty likely because we aren't popular anymore.

2. Loophole. If we were to do this it would have to be insanely clever with absolutely no flaws, but then again falls under the "under the radar" section since we aren't popular anymore (again).

3. Remove donations entirely. This would really be a last resort to when Mojang finds out we are being super super illegal with our system.

Furthermore, what is the consequence for doing such a thing?
Seriously, I liked it way more when it was as simple as not distributing .jars.